Miss Lenaut gave tongue. She spoke in a harsh whisper, leaning malevolently over her desk and spitting out the words at Jordache. “Get out of here, you low, dirty, common foreigner, and take your filthy son with you.”
“I wouldn’t talk like that, Miss,” Jordache said, his voice still calm. “This is a taxpayer’s school and I’m a taxpayer and I’ll get out when I’m good and ready. And if you didn’t strut around with your tail wiggling in a tight skirt and half your titties showing like a two dollar whore on a street corner, maybe young boys wouldn’t be tempted to draw pictures of you stark-assed naked. And if you ask me, if a man took you out of all your brassieres and girdles, it’d turn out that Rudy was downright complimentary in his art work.”
Miss Lenaut’s face was congested and her mouth writhed in hatred. “I know about you,” she said. “Sale Boche.”
Jordache reached across the desk and slapped her. The slap resounded like a small firecracker. The voices from the playing field had died down and the room was sickeningly silent. Miss Lenaut remained bent over, leaning on her hands on the desk, for another moment. Then she burst into tears and crumpled onto her chair, holding her hands to her face.
“I don’t go for talk like that, you French cunt,” Jordache said. “I didn’t come all the way here from Europe to listen to talk like that. And if I was French these days, what with running like rabbits the first shot the dirty Boche fired at them, I’d think twice about insulting anybody. If it’ll make you feel any better, I’ll tell you I killed a Frenchman in 1916 with a bare bayonet and it won’t surprise you that I stuck it in his back while he was trying to run home to his Mama.”
As his father talked, calmly, as though he were discussing the weather or an order for flour, Rudolph began to shiver. The malice in the words was made intolerable by the conversational, almost friendly, tone in which they were delivered.
Jordache was going on, inexorably. “And if you think you’re going to take it out on my boy here, you better think twice about that, too, because I don’t live far from here and I don’t mind walking. He’s been an A student in French for two years and I’ll be here to ask some questions if he comes back at the end of the term with anything less. Come on, Rudy.”
They went out of the room, leaving Miss Lenaut sobbing at her desk.
They walked away from the school without speaking. When they came to a trash basket on a corner, Jordache stopped. He tore the drawing into small pieces, almost absently, and let the pieces float down into the basket. He looked over at Rudolph. “You are a silly bastard, aren’t you?” he said.
Rudolph nodded.
They resumed walking in the direction of home.
“You ever been laid?” Jordache said.
“No.”
“That the truth?”
“I’d tell you.”
“I suppose you would,” Jordache said. He walked silently for awhile, with his rolling limp. “What’re you waiting for?”
“I’m in no hurry,” Rudolph said defensively. Neither his father nor his mother had ever mentioned anything about sex to him and this afternoon was certainly the wrong day to start. He was haunted by the sight of Miss Lenaut, dissolved and ugly, weeping on her desk, and he was ashamed that he had ever thought a silly, shrill woman like that worthy of his passion.
“When you start,” Jordache said, “don’t get hung up on one. Take ’em by the dozen. Don’t ever get to feel that there’s only one woman for you and that you got to have her. You can ruin your life.”
“Okay,” Rudolph said, knowing that his father was wrong, dead wrong.
Another silence as they turned a corner.
“You sorry I hit her?” Jordache said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve lived all your life in this country,” Jordache said. “You don’t know what real hating is.”
“Did you really kill a Frenchman with a bayonet?” He had to know.
“Yeah,” Jordache said. “One of ten million. What difference does it make?”
They were nearly home. Rudolph felt depressed and miserable. He should have thanked his father for sticking up for him that way, it was something that very few parents would have done, and he realized that, but he couldn’t get the words out.
“It wasn’t the only man I killed,” Jordache said, as they stopped in front of the bakery. “I killed a man when there was no war on. In Hamburg, Germany, with a knife. In 1921. I just thought you ought to know. It’s about time you learned something about your father. See you at supper. I got to go put the shell under cover.” He limped off, down the shabby street, his cloth cap squarely on top of his head.
When the final marks were posted for the term, Rudolph had an A in French.
Chapter 4
I
The gymnasium of the elementary school near the Jordache house was kept open until ten o’clock five nights a week. Tom Jordache went there two or three times a week, sometimes to play basketball, sometimes merely to shoot the breeze with the boys and young men who gathered there or to play in the mild game of craps that occasionally was held in the boys’ toilet, out of sight of the gym teacher refereeing the permanent game on the basketball court.
Tom was the only boy his age allowed in the crap game. He had gained entrance with his fists. He had found a place between two of the players in the ring and had kneeled on the floor one night and thrown a dollar into the pot and said, “You’re faded,” to Sonny Jackson, a boy of nineteen waiting to be drafted, and the guiding spirit of the group that congregated around the school. Sonny was a strong, stocky boy, pugnacious and quick to take offense. Tom had chosen Sonny purposely for his debut. Sonny had looked at Tom, annoyed, and pushed Tom’s dollar bill back along the floor toward him. “Go way, punk,” he said. “This game is for men.”
Without hesitation, Tom had leaned across the open space and backhanded Sonny, without moving from his knees. In the fight that followed, Tom made his reputation. He had cut Sonny’s eyes and lips and had finished by dragging Sonny into the showers and turning the cold water on him and keeping him there for five minutes before he turned the water off. Since then, whenever Tom joined the group in the gymnasium, they made room for him.
Tonight, there was no game in progress. A gangling twenty-year-old by the name of Pyle, who had enlisted early in the war, was displaying a samurai sword he said he had captured himself at Guadalcanal. He had been discharged from the Army after having malaria three times and nearly died. He was still alarmingly yellow.
Tom listened skeptically as Pyle described how he had thrown a hand grenade into-a cave just for luck. Pyle said he heard a yell inside and had crawled in with his lieutenant’s pistol in his hand to find a dead Jap captain, with the sword at his side. It sounded to Tom more like Errol Flynn in Hollywood than anybody from Port Philip in the South Pacific. But he didn’t say anything, because he was in a peaceful mood and you couldn’t beat up on a guy who looked that sick and yellow, anyway.
“Two weeks later,” Pyle said, “I cut off a Jap’s head with this sword.”
Tom felt a tug at his sleeve. It was Claude, dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and bubbling a little at the lips. “Listen,” Claude whispered, “I got something to tell you. Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait a minute,” Tom said. “I want to hear this.”
“The island was secured,” Pyle was saying, “but there were still Japs hiding out, coming out at night, and shooting up the area and knocking off guys. The C.O. got pissed off and he sent out patrols three times a day. He told us to clean every last one of the bastards out of the area.